The middle
years of Colin Powell's military career – bordered roughly by the twin
debacles of My Lai and Iran-contra – were a time for networking and
advancement.

The Army footed the bill for Powell's masters
degree in business at George Washington University. He won a promotion
to lieutenant colonel and a prized White House fellowship that put him
inside Richard Nixon's White House.

Powell's work with Nixon's Office of Management and
Budget brought Powell to the attention of senior Nixon aides, Frank
Carlucci and Caspar Weinberger, who soon became Powell's mentors. The
high-powered contacts would prove invaluable to Powell through the 1970s
and 1980s as the personable young officer rose swiftly through the
ranks.

When Ronald Reagan swept to victory in 1980,
Powell's allies -- Weinberger and Carlucci -- took over the Defense
Department as secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense,
respectively. When they arrived at the Pentagon, Powell, then a full
colonel, was there to greet them.

But before Powell could move to the top echelons of
the U.S. military, he needed to earn his first general's star. That
required a few command assignments in the field. So, under Carlucci's
sponsorship, Powell received brief assignments at Army bases in Kansas
and Colorado.

By the time Powell returned to the Pentagon in
1983, at the age of 46, he had a general's star on his shoulder. In the
parlance of the Pentagon, he was a water-walker.

Ground Zero

On June 29, 1983, Colin Powell's spit-polished
shoes clicked through the Outer Ring power corridors of the Pentagon.
Powell was again in the terrain he knew best, his professional home:
official Washington, what he often called "Ground Zero."

He also was back to his future, once more on the
fast track to success.

But Powell had returned to an administration
courting danger. Caught up in an anti-communist crusade around the
world, President Reagan's men were engaged in brush-fire wars against
what they considered the Soviet Union's surrogates. Reagan's operatives
also were battling Democrats in Congress whom the White House sometimes
viewed as little more than Moscow's fellow-travelers.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, the aging
director William J. Casey was pressuring the Soviet Union on all fronts,
through wars that often pitted desperately poor peasants and rival
tribes against one another. Whether in Angola or Mozambique, in
Nicaragua or Guatemala, in Lebanon or Afghanistan, Casey was spoiling
for fights: to finish off the Cold War in his lifetime.

While Casey plotted at CIA, the often inattentive
Ronald Reagan snapped to when battlefield maps were put before him, with
pins representing Nicaraguan contras outmaneuvering other pins for
forces loyal to Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Reagan, the
onetime war-movie actor, and Casey, the onetime World War II spymaster,
loved the game of international conflict and intrigue.

But many of their fiercest battles were fought in
Washington. Liberal Democrats, led by old political war-horse, House
Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, thought that Reagan and Casey
were overly zealous, maybe even a bit crazy. Democrats, as well as some
Republicans, suspected, too, that Casey, the mumbling dissembler, was
treating Congress like a fifth column, like agents of influence slipped
behind his lines to disrupt his operations.

Still, the hub of any American military activity --
whether overt or covert -- remained the Pentagon. It was from the
Defense Department that the special operations units were dispatched,
that the military supplies were apportioned, that the most sensitive
electronic intelligence was collected. All these military
responsibilities were vital to Casey and Reagan, but came under the
jurisdiction of Defense Secretary Weinberger.

To Casey's and Reagan's dismay, the Pentagon brass
favored greater caution when it came to offending Congress. After all,
Congress held the strings to the Pentagon's bulging purse. Maybe Casey
could blow off a senator or offend a congressman, but the Pentagon could
not detonate too many bridges to its rear.

The 'Filter'

Onto that political battlefield stepped newly
minted Brig. Gen. Colin Powell, who had been named military assistant to
Secretary Weinberger. It was a position that made Powell the gatekeeper
for the defense secretary, one of Reagan's closest advisers.

Top Pentagon players quickly learned that Powell
was more than Weinberger's coat holder or calendar keeper. Powell was
the "filter," the guy who saw everything when it passed into
the Secretary for action and who oversaw everything that needed
follow-up when it came out.

Powell's access to Weinberger's most sensitive
information would be a mixed blessing, however.Some of the aggressive covert operations ordered by Reagan and
managed by Casey were spinning out of control. Like a mysterious
gravitational force, the operations were pulling in the Pentagon,
whatever the reservations of the senior generals.

Already, the Democrats were up in arms over
military construction in Honduras, which Reagan insisted was
"temporary," but which looked rather permanent. In El
Salvador, U.S. military advisers were training a brutal army which was
slaughtering political opponents and unarmed villagers in a bloody
counterinsurgency war.In
Costa Rica, the U.S. embassy's "mil-group" was a bustle of
activity as Washington tried to push neutralist Costa Rica into the
Nicaraguan conflict.

Around all these initiatives were U.S. military
officers and non-commissioned trainers who were responsible to Pentagon
authority.The officers
reported to the Southern Command in Panama and "Southcom"
reported to the Pentagon, where at the end of the information flow chart
sat the Secretary of Defense and his "filter," Colin Powell.

Yellow Fruit

This expanding super nova of covert operations
began to swallow the Pentagon a few months after Powell's return. On
Sept. 1, 1983, an Army civilian, William T. Golden, stumbled onto
billing irregularities at a U.S. intelligence front company in suburban
Annandale, Va., which was handling secret supplies for Central America.

The supply operation fell under the code name
"Yellow Fruit," an ironic reference to the region's banana
republics. The billing irregularities seemed modest at first, the
doctoring of records to conceal vacation flights to Europe. But Golden
began to suspect that the corruption went deeper.

By October 1983, Yellow Fruit had turned thoroughly
rotten, and the Army began a criminal inquiry. "The more we dig
into that," Gen. Maxwell R. Thurman, vice chief of the U.S. Army,
later told congressional Iran-contra investigators, "the more we
find out that it goes into agencies using money, procuring all sorts of
materiel."

Reacting to the scandal, Thurman implemented new
secret accounting procedures for supporting CIA activities. "We
have tried to do our best to tighten up our procedures," Thurman
said.

But the muck of the Central American operations was
oozing out elsewhere, too, as Casey recruited unsavory characters from
the region to carry out his bidding. One of the worst of these allies
was Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega, whom Casey found useful funneling
money and supplies to the Nicaraguan contras fighting to overthrow
Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.

In September 1983, Powell traveled with Weinberger
on an inspection tour of Central America. On that trip, they were
accompanied by an eager Marine major from the National Security Council
staff. His name was Oliver North. "From the moment we were
airborne, he started worming his way into Weinberger's presence,"
Powell wrote in My American Journey.

Powell was even more contemptuous of Noriega,
"an unappealing man, with his pockmarked face, beady, darting eyes,
and arrogant swagger," according to Powell. Meeting Noriega, Powell
claimed to have "the crawling sense that I was in the presence of
evil."

There was also intelligence that Noriega was
working with Colombian drug traffickers. Still, Powell has made no claim
that he sought Noriega's ouster from the U.S. payroll. "Cold War
politics sometimes made for creepy bedfellows," Powell
rationalized.

Powell's retrospective disdain for Noriega also
does not square with the enthusiasm some of Powell's Pentagon friends
expressed for the Panamanian at the time. Powell's pal, Richard Armitage,
the assistant defense secretary for inter-American affairs, hosted a
Washington lunch in November 1983, honoring Noriega. "Pentagon
officials greeted Noriega's rise to power with great satisfaction,"
noted author John Dinges.

Noriega's visit coincided with another growing
political problem for the Reagan administration, the refusal of an angry
Congress to continue funding the contra war in Nicaragua. The rebel
force was gaining a reputation for brutality, as stories of rapes,
summary executions and massacres flowed back to Washington. Led by
Speaker O'Neill, the Democratic-controlled House capped the CIA's contra
funding at $24 million in 1983 and then moved to ban contra aid
altogether.

Lebanon Strife

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Reagan's policies
were encountering more trouble. Reagan had deployed Marines as
peacekeepers in Beirut, but he also authorized the USS New Jersey to
shell Islamic villages in the Bekaa Valley, an action that killed
civilians and angered the Shiite Moslems.

On Oct. 23, 1983, Islamic militants struck back,
sending a suicide truck bomber through U.S. security positions and
demolishing a high-rise Marine barracks.A total of 241 Marines died."When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they
assumed the American 'referee' had taken sides," Powell wrote
later, though it was not clear that he ever actively opposed the
ill-fated intervention in Lebanon.

After the bombing, U.S. Marines were withdrawn to
the USS Guam off Lebanon's coast. But Casey ordered secret
counter-terrorism operations against Islamic radicals. As retaliation,
the Shiites targeted more Americans. Another bomb destroyed the U.S.
Embassy and killed most of the CIA station.

Casey dispatched veteran CIA officer William
Buckley to fill the void. But on March 14, 1984, Buckley was spirited
off the streets of Beirut to face torture and eventually death. The
grisly scenes -- in the Middle East and in Central America -- were set
for the Iran-contra scandal.